‘News’ as a drug

Thanks to the 24/7 cable news beast, reality television, instant communication, and social media, news has been turned into a drug.

It gets you high. It consumes you life. It lets you down.

Your last fix came with the saga of the Balloon Boy. He is safe and everyone feels angry toward his father for, it appears, concocting this hoax. You’re angry because you were pulled into the fake drama and the wall-to-wall, TV and Web coverage of the fake plight of six-year-old Falcon Heene.

Not me. I didn’t even know it was happening. I was hunkered down in some small town, trying to get a sense for what makes a community of real people tick.

Stories like Balloon Boy are why I’m moving this blog away from snark, kneejerk reaction and the daily circus of picking at political scabs. Faux indignation, the Pavlovian cable news cycle and enduring drivel from Internet anger cases isn’t fun.

I hate stories like Balloon Boy. But a lot of you love that crap.

Suckers.

The roller-coaster emotions of a modern day news junkieYou was terrified when you thought the kid was in a balloon. You were crushed when the balloon hit the Earth, worried about his health and safety.

Writes Gawker: Blame the Heenes, of course, but who else? Just them? We could blame the rest of us glued to 40″ hi-def images, waiting for the latest fix of manufactured conflict and emotion to get us through to the next blog post. Yes, Gawker is as bad as everyone else. We were part of the assembly line. But we also know that the page view counts on our reality show recaps dwarf anything we put up on, say, the death spiral of the publishing industry.

The only thing I’ve really home taken from this sad story, besides the fact that reality television is bad for people–literally, people, children: from the Gosselins to the Heenes–is that the harder you try to set the truth adrift, the more obfuscation you bury it under, and the more piles of (BS) you throw on top of it, the more gravity is stripped from it, so that, like that (damned) balloon, it rises up, up, up and out of plain view, for everyone to see, completely out of reach of the person from which it had to come from.

The first bit of truth that will be lost, no doubt, is that some of us were complicit in this thing’s makings. If we and you hadn’t tuned in on Thursday afternoon (or clicked through on Saturday), if we weren’t conditioned to lap up whatever reality freak show Richard Heene wanted to give us — or the one he delivered on — would this have happened? Not sure.

But fame — and what passes for genuine drama — is a hell of a drug. So this sad story (that I’d rather someone had have written before it happened, mostly, because kids were involved, and they shouldn’t have been) is about the image of a balloon that might’ve had a kid in it and was terrifyingly captivating. If you watched, you felt terror, and you felt like (crap) for watching it. Between Wife Swap and the video of Falcon Heene may or maybe not being on the balloon, there’s no question that America’s got strong, strong voyeuristic impulses.

How do you think we turn a dime around here?

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